Thus age, which is a necessity for the body, may be
warded off as a disease from the soul, and we may be like the old man in
Chaucer, who had nothing hoary about him but his hairs--
"'Though I be hoor I fare as doth a tree
That blosmeth er the fruit ywoxen be,
The blosmy tree n' is neither drie ne ded:
I feel me nowhere hoor, but on my head.
Min herte and all my limmes ben as grene
As laurel through the yere is for to sene.'"
Hear our author again as to the calling of the poet:--
"To unite earthly love and celestial--'true to the kindred points of
heaven and home;' to reconcile time and eternity; to draw presage of
joy's victory from the delight of the secret honey dropping from the
clefts of rocky sorrow; _to harmonize our instinctive longings for the
definite and the infinite, in the ideal Perfect_; to read creation as a
human book of the heart, both plain and mystical, and divinely written:
such is the office fulfilled by best-loved poets. Their ladder of
celestial ascent must be fixed on its base, earth, if its top is to
securely rest on heaven."
Beautifully, too, does he describe the birth of Poetry; though one may
doubt its correctness, at least if attributed to the highest kind of
poetry.
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